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War Commander: State of the Game – July 2017

It’s time again to evaluate the state of the game and things to come. The previous State of the Game post was a massive three parts, largely because it had been far too long since our last one, but this one is spaced about right, so let’s see if we can get through it in one…

FACTION TRAITS

Faction Traits will be in your hands before the next event. What are Faction Traits? I’m glad you asked! Faction Traits are bonus effects that benefit all your units in any combat so long as all of those units match the Faction you’ve aligned to. So, for example, if you are aligned with the Sentinels, and you deploy only Sentinels units, all of your units will receive the Sentinel Traits. Deploy some Survivor units along with your Sentinel units and none of your units will get the benefits.

So, if you remain loyal to your Faction by deploying only their units, you’ll get some awesome and interesting bonuses. Here’s the list…

The Survivors have Warlust. As units die in combat (both yours and the enemy’s), all of your units will receive a damage bonus. This damage bonus scales up to 100%, meaning that when it reaches it’s maximum potential all of your units deal TWICE their normal damage to all targets. This bonus lasts until combat ends. This trait showcases the Survivors’ fierceness in the heat of battle.

Corpus has Adaptive Defenses. Adaptive Defenses prevents any projectile or single source of damage to any of your units to exceed 15% of that unit’s maximum health. This Trait showcases Corpus’s advanced technology in motion.

The Sentinels have Devotion. Devotion makes your units totally immune to all Status Effects. This includes Cryo, Shock, Corrosion, and all other negative Status Effects in the game. This Trait showcases the unflinching nature of Sentinel troops.

As if that wasn’t enough, there is a fourth (and final) Trait: Loyalty. All three Factions have access to Loyalty (in addition to their unique Trait). Loyalty grants all units of your selected Faction a flat 10% Damage Reduction.

STABILITY AND PERFORMANCE

We recently asked our Tech Director, Sobokop, to provide a detailed report on our plan to improve both stability and performance in War Commander. We wanted to give you some hope that we’ve actually identified some real problem areas in the game and had a plan to address them by providing you a peek into our actual tech improvement roadmap. Sobokop provided in spades.

However, his post was highly, highly technical. As a result, normal human beings (such as myself) did have a hard time understanding all of it. To be as straight forward as possible: for the first time in a long time, I think we’re really turning a corner on this front. We really do understand the agonizing pain of having your third attack in an event result in a disconnect only to have you take 17 hours of damage to your Juggernaut you shouldn’t have.

I want to openly acknowledge how cheap talk is on this front. You guys have heard a lot of words in the past on this very topic. Further, the magnitude of improvements we’re planning are going to take months, not days. That’s why we know we have to push that much harder. We want this effort to be felt by you as soon as possible, but because of the time required for these changes, we’re going to up our communication by providing more updates (probably monthly) on our progress as we make it. So, rather than asking you to just arbitrarily believe, I’m going to ask you to stay tuned and watch it happen.

SKILL AND STRATEGY

Many of the changes and improvements that are coming to the game (and have recently shown up) are focused around something that the game has always been about: core goal of making skill and strategy central to the War Commander experience.

So, in terms of what we’ve done recently, you can see this in our recent changes to Invasion. We restructured the entire system to reward thoughtful, more strategic play. After our recent changes, we saw a 50% drop in the number of players who were able to spam through the Invasion waves on a single attempt to get a high placement! This means that players who took their time, learned the waves, and executed a strong defense were rewarded with better prizes!

Part of maintaining skill and strategy is ensuring that we’re giving you, the players, opportunities to make meaningful choices. If you look at Factions, this is a great example. While we’ve fleshed the Factions out with different units, we’re now adding a new strategic layer with Faction Traits. Figuring out what Faction to select is less about what’s right and more about what’s right for you: each Faction is totally viable, but each is totally different. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

To that last point, balance is a critical part of ensuring meaningful choices. If one Faction or unit is overpowered or underpowered, that’s something we’ll be looking at adjusting. We want to make sure that Commanders of all playstyles are able to play the Faction they want without being completely left in the dust. This does mean that, going forward, we may make some adjustments to units to ensure all Factions retain a pretty good spread of power. It’s worth repeating, however, that we do still want Factions to have strengths AND weakness, so do not expect one Faction to rule them all. If you want yours to be the dominant Faction, you’ll have to fight for it.

WRONGTHINKER THINKS

We have a lot more improvements coming, but our general goal isn’t merely to add stuff to the game, but improve the things we have. I think we’ve illustrated our intentions on this objective above where we’re delivering on improving Factions, we’ve improved Invasion, and we’ve got a strong battle-plan already underway to improve stability and performance in the game. Of course, we have more stuff in the works too, there’s always more stuff than we have room for.

As always, we are honored to have you all along for the ride… and we look forward to the ride getting a bit smoother and more exciting at the same time.